James Lee Burke has published dozens of mysteries in the past four decades, and during that time
he has made the genre his own, using it as a means of expressing his vision of the mythic struggle
between good and evil.

Wayfaring Stranger isn’t a mystery, though it could be considered a thriller. With mixed
results, it demonstrates what happens when Burke’s noir outlook is applied to a complex period of
history.

Most of the novel takes place in the mid-1940s, primarily in Texas, with detours to the
battlefields of World War II and the hills of Hollywood.

Narrator Weldon Holland, who as a boy fires a bullet at the retreating car of Bonnie and Clyde
after their crew has insulted his grandfather, meets both his future best friend and business
partner and his future wife during his time at war in Europe.

He drags feisty, wounded Sgt. Hershel Pine, who insists that he has a nose for where oil and gas
can be located, off the battlefield to safety, and later the two form a pipeline company together.
And he finds Rosita Lowenstein, near death but still capable of a jaunty wink, in a concentration
camp, and soon marries her and brings her back to the States.

There Hershel marries Linda Gail, a small-town girl with big ambitions, who goes on to be “
discovered” by a Hollywood producer and to get involved with wealthy Roy Wiseheart, who has an
ambivalent relationship with his even wealthier and much nastier father.

That father, along with Roy’s social-climber wife and a slimy cop, set out to make life
miserable for Weldon, Hershel and their wives in a range of creative ways.

Burke’s men, on whom his novels usually focus, are intriguingly complicated messes, torn between
honor and a visceral desire for violence, and the relationships among them evolve naturally.

His women are less convincing. Rosita, ever calm and patient, has “thighs like long golden
carp."

Sex with her, through the years, is always a “sacrament,” and she repeatedly tells her husband
things such as “You’re an honorable and brave man, Weldon. For that reason you’ll always be feared
and rejected by the world.”

Linda, to whose point of view the novel frequently, and confusingly, switches in its later
chapters, doesn’t cohere as a character: She veers from innocent victim to scheming adulteress to
compassionate mastermind without any consistency.

Though it might not be the best of Burke’s books,
Wayfaring Stranger hints at how the decisions made back in time shape the contemporary
landscape.